Red Red Wine

Rumour has it that once again, the Ontario government may open up sales of alcoholic beverages to supermarkets. You'd think this would be a fairly popular thing outside of the remnants of Canada's temperance movement. But there's actually a lot of criticism: it'll be harder to get alcohol in smaller places, they'll concentrate on main brands, rather than the wide range you get on dedicated wine and beer stores.

Those aren't necessarily bad arguments. But they are arguments that can be made about virtually any product. For example, if we mandated that crackers had to be sold in government -approved stores instead of supermarkets, they'd have a nice selection of imported and craft crackers, and small towns would be assured of basic service from their local C.C.B.O. (Cracker Control Board of Ontario) store. There'd be negatives of course: it would be inconvenient buying your soup and crackers at different stores. And if you don't like the service, you're out of luck.

The fact is, we in Canada have made the general principle that goods and services should be provided by private businesses unless there's a compelling reason for the government to do it. I don't have a problem with re-examining that philosophy: if you think we'd be better off with the government providing all or most services, put that argument forward.

But the fact is that isn't a very popular point of view. So it's frustrating to see this more-or-less decided point re-opened and re-argued. Given how economically conservative our society has become, there shouldn't be this much opposition to deregulating alcohol sales. Or conversely, given how much opposition there is to deregulating alcohol sales, other conservative economic initiatives shouldn't get the wide support they do.

Either way, it seems a lot of us have difficulty recognizing patterns or thinking in the abstract. We have to learn to think through the consequences of of our guiding principles, and use those principles to guide our decisions so that we don't start from scratch in reasoning out every question.